DIRECTOR: Jasmila Zbanic
STARRING: documentary
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 16 minutes
LANGUAGE: Bosnian, English, German
PLOT: A documentary exploring the life and legacy of Emerik Blum, Sarajevo’s most influential Yugoslav-era businessman and mayor, delving into the rise of his pioneering engineering enterprise, Energoinvest, and its impact on the city’s industrial and social landscape.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
To check out all previous submissions for Bosnia and Herzegovina, click HERE.
STARRING: documentary
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 16 minutes
LANGUAGE: Bosnian, English, German
PLOT: A documentary exploring the life and legacy of Emerik Blum, Sarajevo’s most influential Yugoslav-era businessman and mayor, delving into the rise of his pioneering engineering enterprise, Energoinvest, and its impact on the city’s industrial and social landscape.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
To check out all previous submissions for Bosnia and Herzegovina, click HERE.
FILM REVIEW:
(This review contains spoilers.)
“Energoinvest was created not only to sell but to make a better life for everybody."
Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny, directed by Jasmila Zbanic, is a deeply investigative and unexpectedly emotional documentary about Emerik Blum — a visionary engineer and businessman who embodied the progressive spirit of Yugoslavia’s industrial age. Zbanic, best known for her intimate human dramas, turns her sharp observational lens to the ideological and economic legacy of a man who dared to dream beyond the confines of his time. Through archival footage, interviews, and a restrained yet evocative visual style, the film reconstructs not only Blum’s biography but also the sociopolitical landscape that allowed him to transform Energoinvest into one of Yugoslavia’s most ambitious enterprises.
What distinguishes the film from standard biographical documentaries is Zbanic’s refusal to treat Blum as a static figure of nostalgia. Instead, she situates him in a network of contradictions: an idealist in a system that both nurtured and constrained innovation, a capitalist within socialism, and a builder whose vision would later be undone by the very forces of privatization and nationalism that emerged after Yugoslavia’s collapse. The film’s pacing mirrors the rhythm of industrial modernity, precise, mechanical, yet filled with quiet moments of human reflection. Archival sequences of factory life, bustling offices, and international partnerships feel almost utopian, evoking a period when collective progress seemed both attainable and inevitable.
Zbanic also excels at exposing the fragility beneath this optimism. As former employees and collaborators recount the fall of Energoinvest, the documentary becomes a study in disillusionment. Sarajevo’s once-proud industrial heart turns into a ghost of itself, haunted by economic transitions and forgotten ideals. The cinematography reinforces this transformation: gleaming metal and concrete give way to rust, silence, and decay. Rather than indulging in nostalgia, Zbanic confronts the emotional residue of modernity, the cost of progress and the erasure of collective dreams that once defined an era.
Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny is about agency: individual and collective. Through Blum’s story, Zbanic asks what it truly means to shape one’s destiny within the constraints of history, ideology, and circumstance. The film becomes a meditation on how vision and willpower can alter the course of a nation, but also how easily those achievements can be dismantled when societies lose faith in shared purpose. In resurrecting Blum’s legacy, Zbanic not only honours a forgotten pioneer but also prompts reflection on what it means, today, to believe in progress without cynicism.
(This review contains spoilers.)
“Energoinvest was created not only to sell but to make a better life for everybody."
Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny, directed by Jasmila Zbanic, is a deeply investigative and unexpectedly emotional documentary about Emerik Blum — a visionary engineer and businessman who embodied the progressive spirit of Yugoslavia’s industrial age. Zbanic, best known for her intimate human dramas, turns her sharp observational lens to the ideological and economic legacy of a man who dared to dream beyond the confines of his time. Through archival footage, interviews, and a restrained yet evocative visual style, the film reconstructs not only Blum’s biography but also the sociopolitical landscape that allowed him to transform Energoinvest into one of Yugoslavia’s most ambitious enterprises.
What distinguishes the film from standard biographical documentaries is Zbanic’s refusal to treat Blum as a static figure of nostalgia. Instead, she situates him in a network of contradictions: an idealist in a system that both nurtured and constrained innovation, a capitalist within socialism, and a builder whose vision would later be undone by the very forces of privatization and nationalism that emerged after Yugoslavia’s collapse. The film’s pacing mirrors the rhythm of industrial modernity, precise, mechanical, yet filled with quiet moments of human reflection. Archival sequences of factory life, bustling offices, and international partnerships feel almost utopian, evoking a period when collective progress seemed both attainable and inevitable.
Zbanic also excels at exposing the fragility beneath this optimism. As former employees and collaborators recount the fall of Energoinvest, the documentary becomes a study in disillusionment. Sarajevo’s once-proud industrial heart turns into a ghost of itself, haunted by economic transitions and forgotten ideals. The cinematography reinforces this transformation: gleaming metal and concrete give way to rust, silence, and decay. Rather than indulging in nostalgia, Zbanic confronts the emotional residue of modernity, the cost of progress and the erasure of collective dreams that once defined an era.
Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny is about agency: individual and collective. Through Blum’s story, Zbanic asks what it truly means to shape one’s destiny within the constraints of history, ideology, and circumstance. The film becomes a meditation on how vision and willpower can alter the course of a nation, but also how easily those achievements can be dismantled when societies lose faith in shared purpose. In resurrecting Blum’s legacy, Zbanic not only honours a forgotten pioneer but also prompts reflection on what it means, today, to believe in progress without cynicism.
